not quite a concert review: Tokyo Quartet

[calimac]

Any real judgment of this performance is going to have to wait until further concerts in this series enable me to calibrate the dread question, "Well, what are the horrible Oshman acoustics going to be like this year?" This year the sponsors have bought their own acoustic shell, which looks a lot less effective than the borrowed one they were using last year, and the rub is whether it sounds a lot less effective too.

But the more I think about it, the more I conclude that the sonic inadequacies of last night's concert may be placed securely at the thing's feet. Surely that dry high-treble strongly-textured shiny and bony sound is not something a string quartet would cultivate on purpose? It leeched any warm beauty out of Schubert's string quintet (Jean-Michel Fonteneau, second cellist), and since the Tokyo is not an ensemble that makes much out of the inner structural logic of the works anyway, the result was deadly. Bartok's Third was even worse. It sounded like a rap DJ scratching and rubbing the needle over an LP. Only the Haydn (Op. 77/1) survived the experience.

Next month, Stephen Hough, a pianist I already know, is coming to play the Moonlight Sonata and some Scriabin, and if those sound like this, then I'll know that Oshman is back to being seriously scrod.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Ron just saw them playing in New York and thought they sounded fine.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Sounds awful. I suspect the acoustics are at least partly to blame. I just saw them in Troy NY on Feb. 5th and they were superb, much better than the concert I saw and wrote about at length last year. That they were playing in the acoustically superb Kiggins Hall contributed to the pleasure. A wholly different program from the one you saw, though: A palette-cleansing Rihm bagatelle followed by the Grieg G minor and the Beethoven A minor quartets. Their Grieg made me a fan of that work and their Beethoven was exquisitely assured, moving and beautiful.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Clearly, then, I wuz robbed, and it was the acoustics what robbed me.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd stick with acoustics probably being only partly to blame.

I do have mixed feelings about the group, mostly due to a mismatch in the musical temperaments of the individual players. These days they are pretty deeply conflicted about how to interpret certain pieces in the core repertoire -- I know this for a fact -- and it is a somewhat safe bet that all six of the Bartok quartets are among those "certain pieces", as is the late Beethoven B flat (though not the A minor). On the other hand, my guess is that under the right circumstances they'd play a wonderful Schubert quintet, and handle much of Haydn pretty smoothly too.